Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Daniil Prigozhin

Daniil M Prigozhin, first author of:  Analysis of intraspecies diversity reveals a subset of highly variable plant immune receptors and predicts their binding sites

Current Position: Project Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Education: BA in Mathematics/Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California Berkeley | PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California Berkeley

Non-scientific Interests: non-fiction books on history and culture, world music, cooking

Brief bio: I started out in research as an undergraduate working on the mouse model for the dengue hemorrhagic fever, went on to a PhD on X-ray crystallography of bacterial cell-wall processing enzymes, and a postdoc on epigenetic silencing of young retrotransposons in human cells. The common theme that unites these subjects for me is the host-parasite co-evolution. It is a story that is constantly being written in the language of nucleotides, is enacted using every kind of biomolecule from lipids to small molecules to large protein complexes, and has profound effects on our everyday lives. I am absolutely delighted that our work on the evolution of the plant immune receptors has found a home in The Plant Cell and look forward to conducting more research on plant immunity in the future.